Western Digital 1TB hybrid HDD with 120 GB NAND leaks

Western Digital will announce a 1TB hard disk drive (HDD) with 120 GB NAND flash memory tomorrow. The drives were posted on the website of several online retailers and Western Digital seems to be trying to make it go viral.  The WD Black II dual drive will be a Solid State Hybrid Disk (SSHD) with exciting specifications. SSHD drives combined traditional HDD magnetic storage with NAND memory as found in SSDs.

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Usually manufacturers add only a couple GB of NAND memory to SSHDs, used to cache frequent accessed data resultsing in a speed boost of the system. Slower magnetic storage  is used for storage of less frequently accessed data and bulk storage. So far Western Digital only released SSHDs with a maximum of 24 GB NAND.

The WD Black II (model name: WD1001X06XDTL) is pretty much a full fledged SSD combined with a HDD. Combining the two has the advantage of taking up less space,  likely less power consumption and caching can be managed by the drive instead of additional software.

Western Digital previously announced to cooperate with Sandisk on SSHDs, which could mean the 120GB NAND comes from the Toshiba / Sandisk factories.

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The company has created a special website with the title 'the Power of Two' which has confidential all over it. It seems the intention of the WD marketing department was to go viral and in that they succeeded. They've send out an envelope to beta testers with a link to the Power of Two page and an a thin film overlay for the iPad.

When playing the video with the overlay on the screen the company will reveal hints but unfortunately for WD, several retailer have added the product to their website too early.

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